While reading, I felt like I was really able to relate to everything that the author was saying. Throughout my secondary school experience I never really noticed that teachers were always giving us multiple choice answers over essay based; I never really noticed that my creative mind, thoughts and opinions were being pushed aside to make their own lives easier. Every day my teachers would just stand in front of the smart board, with the chapter typed out on to a nice power point presentation, read off of the board, give us a worksheet on it for homework, and that was it; very rarely was there ever a discussion about it, or a time to challenge something or relate this new information to things in our everyday lives, we were simply learning the facts, that was all there was to it. Not to say that this isn't a form of education, it is, it just lost seems like our generation has given up thinking for ourselves and going that extra mile to really strive for something new and unknown. It's also really hard to even try and think of a way to fix this, because people definitely are being educated this way, just maybe not in the most effective way. Standardized testing really messes with my brain; I simply just do not understand it's purpose. In what way do the SATs help you, honestly. Because the people who do well on them pay a lot of money to get a tutor to teach them how to take the test, most people aren't actually qualified. The SATs and ACTs only test a few "important" subjects, but there are so many different kinds of learners, which really frustrates me. In the classroom I always have a lot to say and share about my thoughts on something and how it relates to the world, and what the underlying meaning is, but I'm constantly being limited and being pushed back by having engraved in to my head that these are not important skills; I will not achieve in life because the SATs do not test on these skills. Our society is thinking so backwards; why cram learning in to a few small categories, when we can be shaping all sorts of different kinds of people? Musicians and artists need to be shaped differently than mathematicians and doctors, these people all learn differently, so why are we teaching them the same things?